Some might say that dysfunctional would be an appropriate word to describe my mother’s family, but I prefer the word colourful! Mum had described her family to me as high Catholics, a phrase I have never understood the meaning of, but she would say it with such pride and a complete lack of irony, which amused me, particularly when I heard about some of the things the family got up to and which went completely against the teachings of the Catholic Church.

For example they practiced Obeah – a form of witchcraft which was illegal and, if found guilty of practising it the penalty was flogging and/or imprisonment.

Some of them were involved in an illegal gaming club where prominent Jamaican men could be entertained by women in private rooms upstairs in the Den of Inequity – isn’t that called a brothel?

My Aunt Vivie was having an affair.

My Aunt Chickie had an illegitimate son called Maurice. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that illegitimacy was the norm in Jamaica at that time, but it certainly wasn’t as frowned upon in Jamaican society as it was in England where the stigma attached to unmarried mothers was huge.

My Aunt Gwennie had a very unpleasant boyfriend, Keith Rousseau, who used to beat her up and ended up in Court on a charge of causing her bodily harm. The Daily Gleaner reported that he was fined £15, which I thought was a huge amount in those days – early 1930s. His mitigating circumstances were that he had had too much to drink and couldn’t help himself!

There were to be many more revelations in store for me on this journey discovering my Mum’s past – some not good at all, but some great, like hearing from Mum about my grandfather Henry, or Pops as she called him. My grandfather was a bit of a rogue, by all accounts, and I have no idea whether we bore any similarities. However, we did have two things in common. We both had the same hero – Marcus Garvey and we both disliked my Great Aunt Martha, my grandmother’s (Becky) sister.

Olga’s Diary (Continued)

Pops: My Pops lives in one roomed shack behind the meat market now that he doesn’t live with us any more. Mammie threw him out because of his womanising ways and drinking. He has a meat stall in the Victoria Market down on the harbour side and every Saturday morning, regular as clockwork, I have to go down there and collect the meat for the weekend.

We always have a little talk before he hands over our meat. You see, that’s Pop’s way of contributing to the family. He always asks after Mammie. I feel sorry for him, he’s all alone and I think he still loves Mammie.

My brothers and sister don’t often see him. I think it’s because he’s black. To be honest, I don’t like being seen with him really either, but he is my Pops and I do it because Mammie asks me to.

In spite of his drinking, Pops is a proud and dignified, but lonely man who collects his memories in a big thick scrapbook; things that have a special meaning, like the letters Mammie wrote to him before they were married. He says when he reads them they remind him of how much they were in love and how they thought they could break down the colour prejudice barriers that there were because a black man and a white woman “had the temerity” to marry. “

“That was what people said” he’d tell me. Pops likes to mimic the posh British accent.

“Mammie and I had the temerity to marry, Olga, isn’t it simply awful, my dear”. He can be very funny sometimes.

Pops has a big stamp collection as well and, do you know, I have no idea where he gets those stamps from because the only people I know who live abroad are my sister, Birdie and Aunt Martha and I know Birdie doesn’t write to him and Aunt Martha and Pops don’t even speak to each other let alone write, they hate each other so. Pops knows I want to go to England for six months so I can study at the same dance school as Birdie and Mammie will only agree to my going if I stay with Aunt Martha.

It was my Pops who first called Aunt Martha the “White Witch of Paddington” hinting that she was like Annie Palmer, a well known, but evil woman, from Jamaica’s past.

Annie Palmer was known as the “White Witch of Rose Hall” and married John Palmer who owned a Great House, called Rose Hall, which had been built at great expense on a hillside overlooking their vast plantation and the Caribbean.

Annie Palmer practised Obeah, smoked ganja, drank heavily and was often seen dancing naked in the moonlight. She also tortured her slaves, murdered three previous husbands – poisoning one, stabbing another and then, if that wasn’t enough, poured boiling oil into his ears, and she strangled the third husband. Eventually one of her slaves murdered her in her bed.

I didn’t think there was that much similarity between Aunt Martha and Annie Palmer, except maybe their height, Annie Palmer was 4’ 11” and Aunt Martha’s not much more, but Pops said if I was ever unlucky enough to get to know Aunt Martha better, I’d be able to work out for myself the similarities between them.

“Don’t trust her, particularly if she’s being nice, because she’s bound to be plotting something” he once told me.

On the front cover of Pops scrapbook are photographs of all of us at various stages in our lives, usually to do with a religious occasion.

There’s one of Birdie being confirmed, Chickie cradling her son, Maurice, after he had been baptised, and a separate one of Dolly, Ruby, Pearl and me, after we’d made our First Holy Communion wearing our long white dresses with wreaths in our hair, and a beautiful wedding photograph of Boysie and Minah and all the family outside the Holy Trinity Cathedral. But in pride of place, right in the middle of us all is a cutting from the London Evening News.

Pops’ hero is Marcus Garvey. He gets his cuttings from the supply of old newspapers he keeps to wrap the meat in that he sells.

“….you can enslave as you did for 300 years the bodies of men, you can shackle the hands of men, you can shackle the feet of men, you can imprison the bodies of men, but you cannot shackle or imprison the minds of men. No race has the last word on culture and on civilisation. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise”

We all know Marcus Garvey. He’s a bit of a troublemaker. Mad as a hatter going round preaching and stirring up trouble. The first time I heard his name was a few years ago and I’d gone down to the market to pick up our meat. Wherever I looked on the docks there were hundreds of red, black and green flags tied to everything and anything, all waving in the wind. Pops told me that all the decoration and bunting was for a “glorious man” The Hon. Marcus Garvey, D.C.L. who was arriving from the United States. When I asked him what D.C.L. stood for he said “Distinguished Coloured Leader”.

Garvey is Jamaican and from a big family too. His parents were poor and as a child he knew about hunger and colour prejudice and some people say that’s why Garvey hates white people. But he says what he hates is the system in Jamaica which keeps the poor man down and the poor are mostly black people.

Pops says black people lack self-esteem and Garvey wants them to have sense of pride in their race, colour and country. Garvey encourages them to “study hard and go into business and unite and help each other and become independent of white Jamaican society who have created two Jamaicas, one white or near white and wealthy and the other black and poor”.

Sydney hates Garvey and says he’s a troublemaker, a swindler, a crook only wanting to get rich quickly and Vivie says he practises Obeah.

Well, honestly, doesn’t everybody?

Garvey holds political gatherings in Edelweiss Park where he puts on entertainment, shows, dance contests, musical presentations, plays and boxing for the benefit of the black people in Kingston. Ruby, Dolly and I were forbidden to go to his rallies, but in true Jamaican tradition, we go in secret.

When we were little, Mammie used to take in lodgers and we still have one, Mr Delgado who has one of the rooms downstairs.He is a salesman, from the Cockpit Country and a direct descendent of the Maroons, who, by the way, hate the British.Mr Delgado loves to tell stories, and always the same one, how years ago the Maroons defeated the British when they tried to recapture the slaves that the Spanish set free after the British had taken Jamaica from Spain.The slaves headed up the mountains and forests into the remote Cockpit Country area of Jamaica and set up communities there.

The British soldiers tried to re-capture them several times but the Maroons, led by a woman called Nanny, outsmarted them.Eventually a truce was called and the Maroons won the right to virtually govern themselves.And every year, Mr Delgado tells us how they celebrate the fact that they were the first black people in the West Indies to gain their freedom nearly 100 years before Emancipation.

Miss Wedderburn, who was my history teacher when I was at Alpha School, was very impressed the day I told the whole class the history of the Maroons – I didn’t tell her I’d heard the story so many times I could repeat it in my sleep and, no doubt, I’ll hear it again.

Viviana is my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie.Vivie’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against Sydney, for the “tots” which is the pet name the family use when they’re talking about Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and me.

At one time we had a lodger called Alfred Moncrieff, a coloured man from Clarendon.I didn’t like Mr Moncrieff one little bit and one day he told me to collect his dirty laundry from his room and give it to Cassie to wash.Well, I turned my back on him, tossed my head in the air and at the same time flicked the back of my skirt in a haughty manner (I saw Jean Harlow do this once in a film) and told him I wasn’t a servant.

That night, when Ruby and I were in bed asleep, Sydney came into our bedroom and dragged me out of bed and gave me a whipping.Mr Moncrieff had told him I had lifted my skirt right up and shown him my knickers.It was a lie.

When Vivie heard what had happened she tore into Sydney something terrible.She was fearless and told him that there was something unnatural about a brother giving his sister a whipping on the bottom and that he should be ashamed of himself.

“You’re too free with your hands on the tots” she told Sydney.

“How could you believe that nasty little man with his dirty little mind and not even ask Olga her side of the story before you dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night”.

She called him cruel, a bully and said “you’re just as bad as Moncrieff”.

I can tell you Sydney’s not used to being spoken to like that. As a matter of fact the whole family was very angry about what Sydney did to me but he’s taken over the role of head of the family now and that’s that.I don’t know whether Mammie ever said anything to Sydney about the whipping he gave me, but the next day she told Moncrieff to get out.

Another lodger was a salesman called Victor Condell, a coloured Jamaican who came from Canada.He used to sell tractors and other kinds of farm machinery.Well, Victor Condell lived with us for over a year and one day, out of the blue, he said he was returning to Canada at the end of the month.My sister, Chickie, was heart broken and cried for days.Eventually she stopped crying long enough to tell us that she and Victor had been courting and she’d fallen in love with him.It came as a big shock to me, I can tell you, I never suspected anything.

To stop Chickie crying, our cook, Aggie Burns, took her to see Annie Harvey, an Obeah woman, to get a love potion to secretly give to Victor to make him stay with her.Annie called it “come to me sauce” and it was in a little blue bottle which Chickie had to mix into Victor’s food, and then wait for the potion to work.Once it works, Annie told Chickie, you can then give Victor another potion called “stay at home sauce” and that keeps him from looking at other women.

Unfortunately, the second potion wasn’t needed because the first one didn’t work.Victor left.So, Aggie Burns, who has a big collection of voodoo dolls, then asked Chickie if she’d like to choose one and she could stick pins in it so Victor would get sick, but Chickie said no.

One day, long after Victor Condell had left, I heard screams coming from Chickie’s bedroom.Mammie told me Chickie was fine, not to worry and to stay right away from her room.But curiosity always got the better of me, so I went up to peek through the keyhole of her bedroom door.Before I could see anything, Sydney had come up behind me, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to my bedroom and gave me a good whipping.“That’s for not doing what you were told” he said. A few days later Pearl, Ruby, Dolly and me were shown Maurice and Mammie told us that Chickie had a little baby boy.

Mum’s writing started back in Jamaica.Her oldest sister, Vivie (Viviana) gave her a green diary that had a little gold lock on it and came with its own special key.

Growing up I remember so well how my Mum, Olga, loved to write. She’d write her stories in school exercise books – simple romantic stories – boy meets girl, they fall in love, marry and live happily every after. Just the backgrounds changed. Mum liked to read the same type of stories that she wrote. In the 1950s there were weekly women’s magazines, like Red Letter and Secrets and others that were filled with these romantic tales. Mum loved reading them and invariably had three or four magazines on the go.

Dear Diary

My First Entry: Jamaicans love big families and the Browneys are no exception. There are thirteen of us including Mammie and Pops. Now only my mother, Mammie, my brother Sydney, me and my sisters Ruby, Dolly and Pearl live in Mission House.

That’s what our house is called and it’s in the same grounds as the Wesleyan Church. It’s quite grand, imposing and very big. At the front of the house there’s a huge old cotton tree which always looks to me as if it is standing guard over us. But the tree does more than that, it keeps the house cool and dry protecting us from the heat and humidity in the summer. The house is red bricked and square, with green shutters at all the windows, which are kept open all the time, except when a hurricane is due. Everyone says the best thing about our house is the upstairs verandas at the front and back because from the front you can see the Caribbean Sea and from the back you can see the Blue Mountains.

Downstairs there is another drawing room, three more bedrooms, a dining room, the kitchen, a pantry and a storeroom. Outside a veranda made from cedar wood surrounds the entire ground floor of the house and out the back is a yard with a big cooking range under a lean to, a bath house, a water closet and, of course, our lovely garden.

Upstairs there are three very large bedrooms, one smaller one and a drawing room. I share one of the bedrooms with my sister, Ruby. Ruby is the most studious and brightest of the younger sisters and loves reading and writing. In secret she writes short stories which she reads to me when we are in bed. I feel very honoured because Ruby doesn’t read her stories to anyone else in the family, just me. Quite often they’re romances where the heroine is a simple country girl who falls in love with the son of a rich landowner and he loves her but his father forbids him to have anything to do with her because she’s not good enough for him, so they don’t see each other any more. But the son can’t bear it and they run off together, get married and live happily every after. That’s why I like Ruby’s stories, they always have a happy ending.

My two other sisters, Dolly and Pearl, share another bedroom. Dolly and Pearl couldn’t be more different. Pearl is quiet and thoughtful and very sweet, so is Dolly, but she is a younger version of my older sister, Vivie, lively and outspoken.

Then there’s my older brother, Sydney. Sydney is married but he and his wife, Janetha, have been separated for years and he lives with us now.

I have another brother, Boysie, whom I adore because he is always laughing and is so much fun to be with. He’s happily married to Minah and even though he has his own family he still finds time to visit us. We all go to Boysie with our problems, never Sydney. I like Minah, she’s nice, but I must admit some of the family don’t like her because she’s Jewish. She’s very pretty with long black straight hair and is quite dark skinned. They have four children and have a very nice house nearby in Duke Street and we’re always in and out of each other’s homes.

One of my older sisters, Birdie, is in London at the moment studying dancing at Madame Verschuka’s School of Dance. This is her second trip to London and Vivie’s been as well and I’m hoping to go soon too. Mammie has a sister, Martha, who lives in Paddington and when ever any of the family goes to England, we stay with Aunt Martha. Birdie says she’s an old trout and doesn’t like her.

I have another older sister, Cissie, who is married to Dyke and they too have four children. They have a coffee plantation in Montego Bay and have been married for about five years. Dyke is lovely. Mammie calls him a gentle giant because he towers over everyone including Sydney. We don’t see much of them at all really, except at family gatherings at Christmas time, or when there’s an occasion, like a wedding or a funeral, or a family crisis.

My Pops doesn’t live with us now, so Sydney is head of the house and supports the family financially. At school I was always top of my class in arithmetic, and when I left Sydney told Mammie he wanted me to work for him in the shop and keep the books in order. I didn’t want the job; what I wanted to do was go to England but Mammie asked me to take the job, so I did.

Sydney says Mission House is far too big to maintain and now there are not so many people living here, we should move to a smaller house. Mammie says he’s right but it’s difficult for her to make the move. Too many memories, she says, good ones and some bad, so for now we’re staying put.

We have two servants, our maid Cassie who’s nearly the same age as me and I like a lot, and our cook, Aggie Burns, who gives me the creeps. One day Sydney decided that Mammie needed help so off he went to find someone and came back with Aggie. But she’s a crazy woman. She believes in Obeah and comes to work some mornings and tells me about great big peacocks that come to her front door and talk to her. Mammie says to ignore her and not upset her because she’s the best cook we’ve ever had.

When I visited my family in Jamaica in 1996 only six of Mum’s siblings were still alive.Boysie, Birdie, Pearl, Chickie (christened Kathleen), Ruby and Dolly.Boysie was living in Canada and I never got to meet him, although Mum spoke to him on the phone.

It was wonderful to finally meet some of Mum’s family – my extended family, the family that as a child I’d always longed for but which, in the main, Mum didn’t like to talk about.She’d say, “it makes me sad”.But ironically, when she was sad, that was when she’d open up a bit and I gleaned little bits of information about her family.I knew that as small children Mum, Ruby and Dolly had been very close and it was interesting to see just how much Ruby and Dolly looked like Mum, as well as being a bit unnerving.

Although I’d warned my aunts before I left the UK that Mum wouldn’t be coming with me to Kingston because she had serious health problems, I think a little bit of them was hoping she would appear at the last minute.But her non appearance didn’t diminish in anyway the reception they gave me.They had thrown a “Welcome Home” party for me attended by their children – my cousins – and family and their friends.It was all a bit overwhelming really.I was so glad my son Stuart had come with me. My aunts made a great fuss of Stuart too and it took some of the pressure of me.

My aunts made a huge fuss of me and were genuinely excited to meet Olga’s daughter. They were so excited, like small children, constantly chattering and interrupting each other so they could speak to me, hugging me and always one of them holding my hand.They’d ask me over and over again “How is Olga?”.“Why didn’t Olga let us know she was alive”?It was strange to hear Mum being called Olga, because I’d only every known her as Carmen.When I asked them why she changed her name from Olga to Carmen, they said they had no idea.She was always Olga to them.I was to find out the answer to that one later.

During slavery, the plantation remained the most important unit and a rigid class system existed. You were judged to be important according to the type of work you did, by the colour of your skin and how much money and land you owned.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, slavery’s legacy was the social structure it had created before Emancipation – a three-tier class structure at the top of which was the white upper class. Then came the coloureds, followed by the blacks. Although Jamaican whites did mix with coloureds in official and business circles, because of their colour prejudice, they refused to mix with them socially. As for the blacks, both the whites and the coloureds treated them as if they were less than human, although there were some exceptions.

Becky left “Mon Repose” very early this morning leaving a note asking Martha and me to meet her at the hotel in the afternoon as she had something to tell us. Martha is considering staying on in Jamaica and opening a dress salon, but is hesitant about taking such a big step. She has struck up a friendship with Thomas Bonnett who owns a large department store on Harbour Street. Apparently he was very impressed when she told him she worked at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and he realised she had skills he could make use of. Thomas suggested she stayed on in Jamaica and work for him, until she felt the time was right to start up on her own, or returned to England, whichever she decided to do.

Becky’s always been self-sufficient and can amuse herself. Sometimes she takes a boat to Port Royal, the train to Montego Bay or Port Antonio. One day I asked her if she makes these trips alone and she confessed she had met someone special. I suspect this “someone special” is the reason she has asked Martha and I to meet her here.

The Constant Spring must be the most beautifully situated Hotel in the whole of Jamaica. It’s as tropical as you can get, set 600 feet above sea level and at the foot of the Blue Mountains amid sugar, banana, pineapple and coffee estates.

As you come up the front steps of the hotel there is a splendid Royal Palm tree standing in the main entrance. Inside it is cool, comfortable and elegantly furnished and outside there are spacious cool verandas where you can sit and take in the scent given off from the exotic and colourful tropical plants and shrubs that fill the hotel’s gardens. The hotel serves wonderful ice cold fresh fruit drinks, like pineapple and coconut or the hotel’s specialty, a drink called matrimony, made with the pulp of an orange and a custard apple which is what Martha and I are drinking while we waited for Becky.

On an immaculate green lawn to my left a group of men and women are playing croquet. On my right, elderly guests, who find the sun too hot, sit under shaded arbours and tropical foliage which provides shelter from the unrelenting sun, either reading or quietly talking; elsewhere some children are shrieking and laughing while playing, what sounds like, a game of hide and seek, in the hotel’s specially designed children’s garden.

Sitting a few tables away from me are some men and women talking and laughing loudly at the tactics that had taken place at a practice game on the polo field that morning. And in front of me beyond the gardens and shrubbery, is the tennis court from where, in the distance, I can hear a game is being played and the players calling out “well played” and “good shot” as a winning point is scored.

At last I saw Becky coming towards me. She looked beautiful. Her long blond hair tied loosely back with a yellow ribbon and wearing a simple white dress which showed off her perfect, slim figure. She was holding hands with a good looking young man and laughing at something he was saying to her, both of them completely oblivious to the glances the other guests were giving them.

I knew immediately they were in love. They sat down still holding hands and Becky introduced him to Martha and me.

“This is Henry” Becky said and then she paused before she added “and Henry has asked me to marry him.”

His name was Henry Alexander Browney and he owned a meat market down by Kingston Harbour. Becky chatted away, telling us how they met and Henry sat quietly listening. There was a pounding in my head and I felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. I reached out for my drink, my matrimony, but knocked it over – an involuntary action or a reaction. I couldn’t say. Becky was still chattering away singing Henry’s praises.

“He’s charming, intelligent, articulate, well read and very amusing” she told us. I agree that any man with those attributes one would consider to be a real catch for a woman. But as Becky sat next to him in her pretty white dress I could only focus on the fact that Henry was as black as coal!

It is not an exaggeration to call Jamaica a paradise. But it has an ugly past. Non whites far outnumber whites and the colour and social prejudice, which was the mainstay of slavery, remains today. The white upper classes still have all the economic control, social prestige, political power and status. They still see as inferior the middle class, who range from almost white to pure black and who may be lawyers, doctors, business men or women, teachers, clergy, and skilled tradesmen.

It is true that this class is not barred from occupying a position in any walk of life, including public service, providing they are suitably educated and qualified. Some of them are magistrates of Petty Sessions, and some are Chief Magistrates of their Parishes. In the capacity of their professional positions they can and do associate with white people on equal terms. But that is where the association stops. In their private social life white Jamaican, with a few minor exceptions, refuse to mix with educated and wealthy coloureds or blacks.

It came as a surprise to me that these middle classes don’t want or expect to be invited into white Jamaican circles. Because of indoctrination during slavery, the coloureds believed they were inferior to white people but superior to the blacks and in turn the blacks believed they were inferior to both groups.

But what has changed significantly with the middle classes is the tendency to be very obsessed with skin colour and what they consider to be good European-type features, like the shape of a nose and hair. It seems that with emancipation the question of colour seems to have become more, rather than less, important as a sign of status.

A marriage between a coloured man and white woman would be superficially acceptable if he were very rich and influential, which in itself would be a very rare occurrence, but would also be considered damaging to the purity of the white race.

A marriage between a white man and coloured woman would be tolerated. I saw this advertisement recently in the Daily Gleaner.

It was not the first time I had seen something like this and I expect the young man will find what he’s looking for since there are quite a few rich coloured Jamaican women. He will get financially security and she will get a very cool and limited entry into white Jamaican society being excluded from the more prestigious events that were held.

The only relationship between a white man and a black woman that I have heard of was during slavery. White men don’t advertise for black woman to marry, even if they are wealthy and educated.

If Becky, a white woman, plans to go ahead with this marriage to a black man, she can expect, with a possible few exceptions, to be ostracised completely by Jamaicans whatever their colour, after all it wasn’t too long ago that it was against the law for a white woman to marry or have children with a black man.

I knew that with Becky’s news, Martha’s dream of owning a successful dress salon would suffer. I felt sorry for her because she had been tantalisingly close to achieving what she wanted most but being Becky’s sister would ensure that she too was excluded from Kingston’s elite social circle.

Martha said nothing throughout the meeting, but I read her eyes and her reaction was cold fury. I don’t think she looked at Henry but, as she got up to leave the table, she leaned towards Becky and whispered something in her ear.

As Martha left I realised the rest of the guests had all been watching us. Lucy and Henry were still sitting holding hands and maybe the enormity of what they were about to undertake was beginning to dawn on Becky. I worry for Becky’s future but am overwhelmed with admiration and so very proud of her. Prejudice does exist between Jamaicans and it is a strong person whose voice or actions make it clear that they are not part of the colour and social structure that operates here.

As Henry, Becky and I prepared to leave the hotel, I asked her what Martha had whispered. “Nothing. She was just being silly”.

That evening was a typical tropical night, still, beautiful and clear with the moon riding high in a cloudless sky. A wind slowly started to get up throughout the night and steadily increased in force until by about 2 am in the morning when it must have reached over 100 m.p.h. With it came a ferocious rainstorm and relentless thunder and lightning.

The next day the devastation was awful. Coconut trees that had stood for fifty years were torn up by the roots and thrown yards away as if they were matchsticks. Plantations, including my own, have been hit badly, but nowhere near as badly as the peasants who will have lost their homes as well as their crops. Years of work wiped out in one night. God knows what these poor people will do without money or means to restore the crops on which their livelihood entirely depends.

Martha called it retribution for Becky’s actions. A little dramatic, I thought. Shortly afterwards Martha returned home alone to England.

“Yesterday was one of the strangest days I’ve experienced. It started innocently enough with Lucy and I having breakfast on the veranda overlooking their plantain field. A plantain is almost exactly like a banana and grows in enormous bunches just the way bananas do, but they are bigger and green, not yellow.

From the verandah I could see John at the entrance to a field listening intently to a wizened old man. Standing next to the old man was a small black boy who carried a large basket.

“Who is the old man” I asked Lucy

“He’s an Obeah man and he’s going to dress the garden”

“What on earth are you talking about, Lucy?”

Then she explained Obeah was a form of witchcraft and that an Obeah man or woman is the person, or practitioner, as they like to be called, who controls the supernatural world using spirits to harm people with techniques passed down in secret from one generation to another. I was fascinated and wanted to hear more.

“There could be many reasons why someone might want the services of an Obeah man. It may be for a medical reason, if someone is ill in which case the patient would be given a bottle of something to take or they would have to follow certain instructions. But often it’s to do with getting revenge on someone who has caused you harm in some way; maybe you wanted to discover a thief or sometimes it’s for more romantic reasons – you want to make a particular person fall in love with you or you might want to win at gambling.”

But do you and John believe in it, Lucy?”

“We don’t, but many white Jamaicans do and John is certainly prepared to indulge in it if it is to his advantage.”

“We’re being robbed of six or seven bunches of plantain every week in spite of employing extra men to watch the fields and that’s why we’ve arranged for an Obeah man to solve the problem for us” she said.

There could be something in it, Becky, if for no other reason than the Obeah man’s knowledge of poisons is far beyond that of the European druggists. Most practitioners learned how to use herbs for cures. The practitioners knowledge of the roots and herbs brought over from Africa remained with them since most of the same plants grew in the tropical climate of Jamaica and so the customs and practices were passed down from generation to generation.”

The old man took the basket from the boy and went into the field where there were rows and rows of plantain trees. He took out from his basket different sized bottles, which had some sort of liquid inside them. Then, he walked up and down the rows of plantains and tied a bottle on to some of the fruit, at the same time muttering some sort of incantation. When he had done that he would wave his arms over the plantain and genuflect. Once that was done he would move on to another row of plantain and perform the whole ceremony over again and continue to do that until he’d done the whole field.

After that he produced, from his basket, a tiny little black wooden coffin, which with great pomp and circumstance he placed in the branches of a big old cotton tree. Then he took a saucer from his basket and put some water in it and dropped some egg shells in the water and then put the saucer on top of the coffin in the cotton tree. The old man walked right round the field again waving his arms all over the place, still muttering and went over to John who gave the old man some money and he and the boy then left the field. “And that little exhibition is known as “dressing the garden” and, hopefully, that will be the end of the thieving now”. Lucy said.

She continued, “Once word gets around that the Obeah man has been in the field people will believe he has put a curse on anyone entering it. They will be convinced that terrible things will happen to them if they do.”

According to John the Government made Obeah illegal and it was hoped that after emancipation, with the missionaries bringing Christianity to the freed slaves, Obeah would be wiped out – but it just continued in secret, pretty much the same as now. It’s deep rooted in the black and coloured Jamaican’s heritage and culture and even though you might come across a family that is both Christian and well educated, the likelihood is that someone in it will be dabbling in Obeah.

It strikes me that emancipation hasn’t changed much in Jamaica, her present is still very much tied to her past.”

Even though my mother was deeply religious, and obeah was against the teachings of the Catholic Church, Mum couldn’t let go of the culture that had been so much part of her life growing up in Kingston, Jamaica. I grew up in Brighton on the south-east coast of England in the 1950s, where there were no obeah practitioners to work their ‘magic’, but Mum often told me stories of how when someone upset any member of her family – her mother, my grandmother Becky – would contact their local obeahman to make a spell so the person would be punished for their wrongdoing.

As far as I could work out from my research, obeah’s power lay in a practitioner working on the fears of a people who were fundamentally superstitious to start with and that included my Mum. Since just about every black and coloured person in Jamaica during the 1920-30s (and the years beyond) believed in obeah, once they knew it was being worked against them, they were convinced they were doomed to either some kind of excruciating pain or worse, death.

Obeah practitioners had other skills too and were often consulted over medical problems rather than a conventional doctor. They were very knowledgeable about plants and herbs that grew in Jamaica, information which had been passed down through the centuries from generation to generation. They would successfully prescribe herbal remedies for a variety of ailments, not only for coloured and black Jamaicans, but white also.

The South East of England is not the West Indies, so when I was ill as a child I wasn’t treated with exotic herbs. My alternative treatments were more down to earth – I can’t tell you the number of times I had boiled onions wrapped in muslin and tied around my feet to bring my temperature down or had to put a matchstick behind my right ear to get rid of some pain I had – usually a stomach ache. Mum told me her mother, Becky, used to do this for her when she was a child. She said it worked for her and it did for me too. Power of suggestion, maybe?

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Why I Wrote ”Olga – A Daughter’s Tale”

In 1994, my mother, Carmen Browne, was admitted to the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton in the UK seriously ill. As she slowly recovered I realized that had she died so too would the chance of my finding out about her past, her family in Jamaica and, of particular importance to me, who my father was information she had consistently refused to share with me. So I decided to find out for myself.

My first discovery was that my mother’s real name was Olga Browney, born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and one of eleven children from a close-knit, coloured Catholic family. A kind, naïve and gentle girl, my mother arrived in London in 1939 and lived with a malevolent, alcoholic aunt, intending to stay for only six months. However, world events, personal tragedy and malicious intent all combined to prevent her from returning home to Kingston.

"Olga - A Daughter's Tale" is based on a true story about cruelty, revenge and jealousy inflicted on an innocent young woman and about moral courage, dignity, resilience and, in particular, love. It is the story of a remarkable woman, who because of circumstances, made a choice, which resulted in her losing contact with her beloved family in Jamaica, until nearly half a century later, when her past caught up her.

What I discovered about my mother filled me with such admiration for her that I wanted her story recorded for future generations of my family to read so that they would know about this remarkable woman whose greatest gift to me was her unconditional love. That's why I wrote “Olga – A Daughter’s Tale”.